ABOUT US

PHILOSOPHY

Our goal is a simple one: to connect passionate producers making honest, authentic wines with equally passionate customers. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel or revolutionize the business. We’re proudly plying a trade filled with a rich history that dates back millennia. Achieving our goal comes down to building strong personal relationships with three important groups: our customers, our producers, and our employees. It’s pretty simple really – carefully select producers for the long-term, go above and beyond what customers, both in the trade as well as individual consumers, expect, and build a company culture based around employee enthusiasm and well-being.

As far as our wine philosophy goes, you’ll be disappointed if you were hoping to find a grand, dogmatic manifesto here. Where we are dogmatic is in demanding the absolute highest quality in all our wines, regardless of price point. That’s not to say we don’t have our own strong opinions on wine, but we realize that wine is far too complex to break down into black and white issues and have learned that pretty much every time we think we know something to be certain, a wine will come along and shatter whatever notion we had. In short, we try to keep an open-mind while staying true to what we believe in. Also sometimes we can get too caught up in the details and forget to see wine for what it is on its most basic and fundamental level: something meant to bring people together, rather than apart, and bring happiness to those who consume it.

So what is it that we do believe in? Here is our mini-manifesto (wine and otherwise). Our portfolio is centered around 1) small producers that are passionate about the wines they’re making and 2) authentic, honest wines that express their terroir. Thing we love in wine: high acidity, minerality, balanced alcohol levels, quirky, off-beat, and oft-overlooked wines that make the wine world such an interesting place, traditional winemaking that preserves the ways of the past as well as young upstarts daring to be different. Other things we love: East Coast oysters, negronis, Ippudo ramen, Kölsch beer, 90s Hip-Hop, and the Cincinnati Bengals. Things we don’t love: overuse of new oak, over-ripe & over-manipulated wines with no sense of place, sharks, the G train, and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

We are big believers in wines being made with as little manipulation as possible, and our portfolio focuses on natural, organic, and biodynamic wines. Here, again we take a simple approach: not only are these wines better for us but time and time again we’ve found that these producers make wines that taste better than their conventionally farmed counterparts.

We realize that not everyone is going to see things exactly as we do and that’s okay. The myriad opinions and tastes in the wine world are what make it such an exciting place. We’re grateful just to play a role in connecting our amazing producers with our amazing customers (and especially grateful to do this for a living). We hope you like what we do, but we’re always looking for ways to improve, so drop us a line and tell us what you like, or more importantly, what you think we could be doing better.